Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Read Free

health of the Church at the beginning of the sixteenth century that such fervent voices were heard everywhere. In the winter of 1511 John Colet stepped into the pulpit, at his own cathedral church of St Paul’s in London, and preached of religious reform to the senior clergy of the realm. He repeated his theme to a convocation of clergy in the chapter-house of Canterbury. ‘Never’, he said, ‘did the state of the Church more need your endeavours.’ It was time for ‘the reformation of ecclesiastical affairs’. The word had been spoken, but the deed was unthinkable. What Colet meant by ‘reformation’ was a rise in the quality and therefore the renown of the priesthood.
    He despised some of the more primitive superstitions of the Catholic people, such as the veneration of relics and the use of prayer as a magical charm, but he had no doubt on the principles of faith and the tenets of theology. On these matters the Church was resolute. In May 1511 six men and four women, from Tenterden in Kent, were denounced as heretics for claiming among other things that the sacrament of the altar was not the body of Christ but merely material bread. They were forced to abjure their doctrines, and were condemned to wear the badge of a faggot in flames for the rest of their lives. Two men were burned, however, for the crime of being ‘relapsed’ heretics; they had repented, but then had taken up their old opinions once more. The Latin secretary to Henry, an Italian cleric known as Ammonius, wrote with some exaggeration that ‘I do not wonder that the price of faggots has gone up, for many heretics furnish a daily holocaust, and yet more spring up to take their place’.
    The career of Ammonius himself is testimony to the fact that the Church was still the avenue for royal preferment. This was a truth of which Thomas Wolsey was the supreme embodiment. Wolsey arrived at court through the agency of Bishop Foxe, the lord privy seal, and seems almost at once to have impressed theyoung king with his stamina and mastery of detail. By the spring of 1511 he was issuing letters and bills directly under the king’s command, thus effectively circumventing the usual elaborate procedures. He was still only dean of Lincoln, but he was already advising Henry in affairs international and ecclesiastical.
    He had the gift of affability as well as of industry, and was infinitely resourceful; he did what the king wanted, and did it quickly. The king’s opinions were his own. Wolsey was, according to his gentleman usher, George Cavendish, ‘most earnest and readiest in all the council to advance the king’s only will and pleasure, having no respect to the case’. He was thirty-eight years old, and a generation younger than the old bishops of the council. Here was a man whom the young king could take into his confidence, and upon whom he could rely. Wolsey rose at four in the morning, and could work for twelve hours at a stretch without intermission. Cavendish relates that ‘my lord never rose once to piss, nor yet to eat any meat’. When he had finished his labours he heard Mass and then ate a light supper before retiring.
    Wolsey therefore became the instrument of the king’s will, and no more forcefully than in the prosecution of Henry’s ambitions against France. In November 1511 Henry joined a Holy League with the pope and with his father-in-law, Ferdinand of Spain, so that they might with papal approval attack France. Henry longed for war, and of course an excuse for combat could always be found. In this instance the incursion of French troops into Italian territories was cited as the reason for hostilities. In the following month a Christmas pageant was devised for the king at the house of the black friars in Ludgate, in which were displayed an artificial lion and an antelope. Four knight challengers rode out against men in the apparel of ‘woodwoos’, or wild men of the forest. It was a spectacle in praise of battle. A few months